John Cleese

John Cleese - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of John Cleese

John Marwood Cleese ( KLEEZ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and television presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report (1966–1967). In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the surreal sketch comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974). Along with his Python costars Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, Cleese starred in the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).

This profile of John Cleese covers Early Life and Family Background, 1963–1968: Pre-Python, 1969–1983: Monty Python, 1970–1979: Fawlty Towers and 1980–1999.

Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth cowrote the television sitcom Fawlty Towers (1975–1979), in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, which earned him the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the BFI TV 100, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.

Cleese wrote and starred in the heist comedy film A Fish Called Wanda (1988), for which he received Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, and Golden Globe award nominations, and its quasi-sequel Fierce Creatures (1997). He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Silverado (1985), Clockwise (1986), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), George of the Jungle (1997), Rat Race (2001), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). His prominent franchise film roles include R and Q in the James Bond films The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002), Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and the last three Shrek films (2004–2010). He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Cheers (1987) and was nominated for 3rd Rock from the Sun (1998) and Will & Grace (2004).

Cleese has specialised in political and religious satire, dark humour, sketch comedy, and surreal humour. He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians. He cofounded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films as well as The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Formerly a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999, he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage.

Early Life and Family Background of John Cleese

John Marwood Cleese was born on 27 October 1939 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn (née Cross, 1899–2000), the daughter of an auctioneer. His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name Cleese when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923. Cleese's grandfather, John E. Cheese, was a solicitor's clerk in Bristol. As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City Football Club and Somerset County Cricket Club. Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School, paid for by money his mother had inherited, where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing. When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, a public school in Bristol. By that age, he was more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall.

Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had left its plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In his autobiography So, Anyway, he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: "It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world."

Cleese could not go straight to the University of Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti). He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law. He also joined the Cambridge Footlights. He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall, where he was asked if he could sing or dance. He replied "no" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing. He was then asked "Well, what do you do?" to which he replied, "I make people laugh."

At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962. He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take! Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second. Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father sent him cuttings from The Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places such as Marks & Spencer.

1963–1968: Pre-Python of John Cleese

Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths. The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed Cambridge Circus and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in October 1964.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleese), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.